Torsten Kälvemarks blogg om allt mellan himmel och jord

Syrien igen

Man kan förstås bara instämma i vad kommentatorn Semi İdiz skriver på den engelskspråkiga turkiska sajten Hürriyet Daily News: ”Al-Assad has to go, of course, and not just that. If he is still alive, he must stand trial for crimes against humanity. That is for certain.”

The situation in Syria is not a simple game with al-Assad and his Baathists on one side and the Syrian people on the other. For all his evil-doing there are still large swathes of Syrian society that hanker for the stability they enjoyed under al-Assad…

Neither is it clear just how the “Free Syrian Army” is composed. Indications are that there is a significant involvement by radical and rabidly anti-Western Islamists who would clearly desire to see an Islamic republic emerge in Syria.

Neither have things gone the way Ankara would have liked, now that we have Syrian Kurds organizing to avail of the advantage provided by the chaos in the country in order to declare their autonomous region…

Put another way, even a cursory glance shows us that we do not just have the Sunni-Alevi fault line in Syria but also the Arab-Kurdish, and Christian-Muslim fault lines. This is why it is naïve to assume that all will somehow be well after al-Assad goes.

So the question is: what happens then? The great fear is that it could go the same way as Iraq and Lebanon, two neighboring countries that share about the same mix of ethnic and religious groups (in differing proportions) as Syria.

Lebanon tore itself apart in a civil war between those groups from 1975-90, and a quarter-million Lebanese died. Iraq tore itself apart in 2005-2009, and at least half a million Iraqis died. Two million people fled the country permanently, including almost all of Iraq’s Christian minority, and the Sunni Muslims have almost all been driven out of mixed and Shia-majority areas.

Any intelligent Syrian, aware of these dreadful precedents, will be frightened by regime change no matter how much he or she loathes the existing regime. Indeed, the al-Assad regime’s principal means of garnering support has been to insist that only its tyrannical rule can “protect” the Shia, Druze, Alawite and Christian minorities from the 70 percent Sunni Muslim majority.

Parallels between Iraq and Syria are instructive. Under authoritarian regimes in Iraq and Syria, a sectarian minority ruled the sectarian majority. Under Saddam, Sunnis had the upper hand over Shiites, and under Assad Alawites dominated the Sunni majority. Both Iraq and Syria had regimes with Baathist backgrounds. In both Syria and Iraq, secular Arab nationalism established a common denominator. And in both countries, the Christian minority deeply feared the alternative to secular authoritarianism. Secular authoritarianism did not provide equal rights for Christian Arabs. But it was surely preferable to an alternative such as Islamist authoritarianism. This is why Syria’s Christian communities still support the Assad regime. They just have to look next door, at the decimated Christian community of Iraq, to see the alternative to secular authoritarianism.

New York Times rapporterade för någon månad sedan: ”A small number of C.I.A. officers are operating secretly in southern Turkey, helping allies decide which Syrian opposition fighters across the border will receive arms to fight the Syrian government, according to American officials and Arab intelligence officers.”